Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're going to be talking about lessons that God has taught me through life. In particular, I'm going to be talking about lessons that God has taught me through my 26 years of being a Jehovah's Witness. What I've seen in life, not only from my own experience but from that of others, is that there is no evil that God permits in this world. There are no hardships, no disappointments, or failures that we undergo from which God can't teach us lessons.
That is, if we'll only let Him do that. In fact, I think one of the primary purposes of a Christian's life here on earth, other than to serve our King and to expand the kingdom, is to learn. And by that, I don't mean just learning from the Scriptures, but rather learning from the school of life. One person has said this: "The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test.
In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson." Someone else has said, "Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you." So, as I share with you some of the things I've learned from my life experiences, I want you to be thinking about lessons perhaps you've learned or that you could learn from situations or hardships you've gone through in life.
The three lessons we're going to be talking about tonight are these: Number one, always hear both sides of every story before you form any conclusions. Number two, don't stereotype people outside of your church or your spiritual group. And number three, appreciate the precious gift you've been given of being able to read the Bible alone, by yourself, without needing someone else to tell you what it really means. So, let's start with lesson number one: hearing both sides of a story before you come to a conclusion.
This is not only something we should learn from life; it's something we should learn from the Scriptures as well. Proverbs 18:17 says, "The first one to plead his cause seems right, until his neighbor comes and examines him." By examining him, it means like cross-examining, asking questions, telling the other side of the story. Now, this lesson was brought home to me in a powerful way after leaving Jehovah's Witnesses.
As a Jehovah's Witness, and this would be true of probably most other groups, you could fill in the blank there with about any name. But I was saying, as a Jehovah's Witness, you have a very slanted view on every story and every testimony.
If a Jehovah's Witness shares with other members of the congregation that he's being treated wrong at work, or a sister says her husband's mistreating her, or a neighbor's done this or that, well, we would automatically just accept the version that the member of our congregation gave us. And as I said, that's not unique with Jehovah's Witnesses; that would be true of just about every church that's out there.
And it never occurred to me that there might be a totally different side of the story, not when it was one of our brothers or sisters involved. Now, one of the things I heard about most of my life while I was a Witness was how the relatives, that is, the non-Witness relatives of Jehovah's Witnesses, always gave them such a hard time, just made life miserable for them.
And this was sort of a badge of our Christianity, the persecution that we got from our "unbelieving relatives." And so it was an utter, utter shock to me after I left the Witnesses and made friends with people from various other backgrounds and joined an evangelical church that my friends and members of my congregation would comment to me when they knew I was a former Jehovah's Witness, just how miserable the Witnesses made it for their relatives who weren't Witnesses.
Now, that really surprised me even after leaving the Witnesses. I mean, I'd still assumed everything was just the way I heard it, that you're Jehovah's Witness, all of your non-Witness relatives, they just give you a hard time because you don't celebrate Christmas or you don't celebrate Easter or the 4th of July or because you go house to house or just whatever it happens to be.
But now I was hearing from all of these other people that they wanted to just live in peace with their Witness relatives, but the Witnesses were the aggressors, the ones who made life miserable, reproaching them for celebrating pagan holidays like Christmas, always trying to witness to them or give them literature even when the relative made it clear that they really weren't interested. They would like to just be family friends and stay out of theological discussions. So which side of the story is true?
Well, I mean, I don't know. I'd have to live in both situations, but my guess is there's probably a little truth on both sides. Each person is seeing it from their own perspective. But having been a Witness, I know that we were very aggressive in our evangelism, and so my guess would be it was the Witness who was the aggressor that the relatives would have left them alone if they had politely explained their convictions and left it at that.
But again, two totally different stories that I would not have believed possible up until that time. Well, another one that really surprised me, when I was a Witness and I spent a lot of time in door-to-door evangelism and would often get into discussions with ministers or persons who had a good enough working knowledge of the Scriptures that they could defend what they believe and enter into, well, I guess to be honest, into an argument.
But what it always seemed like when I talked with someone like that, that just when I was getting to the point where I felt like I could pin their back against the wall, I had the verses right there, that they would change the subject and then would be on something else. And then just when I thought, "Good, I've got them here, I've got my proof text all lined up, I'm going to nail them," the subject would change again.
And invariably, I'd go back to the car where the other Witnesses were waiting and say, "You know, those clergy, if you could just pin them down, but you can't, they keep changing the subject on you." And the other Witnesses would agree. That was their experience too. You just couldn't pin most people down that always changed the subject just when you got them into an uncomfortable position. And so it really surprised me in church one day when someone heard I was a former Jehovah's Witness.
They came up and talked with me briefly, and then they made the comment, "You know, I found that if you could just pin them down, you could show them the real gospel, but you can't because they keep changing the subject every time you get their backs against the wall." That just floored me. I thought, "What? I thought it was you guys changing the subject, and here the other people thought it was the Witnesses who kept changing the subject." And I have no idea who changes the subject.
All I know is when you get into one of those discussions, the subject keeps changing, and each person has an entirely different perspective of who's doing it. Now, those are just two examples I'm giving you because they're of things that I thought there was no possible other side. My mind was totally convinced. Like I said, even after leaving the Witnesses, I mean, this seemed to be an objective reality of things. I would never have believed that there would be an entirely different side to it.
And it made me wonder, well, how many other things in life are like that, where I've always heard one side or I've only experienced it from one viewpoint, and it's always seemed to be a certain way. Could it be that somebody else is seeing it entirely different? And I realized right there, I need to make sure before I form opinions, particularly negative opinions about somebody, I need to hear their side of it.
And in any situation, I need to hear several viewpoints before forming a conviction, even if it's involving my friends and members of my church. I need to hear the other side. I shouldn't assume just because these people are my friends, that they go to my church, that anyone else is automatically in the wrong. Just because somebody is a Christian and a genuine Christian doesn't mean that they don't make mistakes and that some unbeliever might be right about a situation.
Or it may be that the truth lies somewhere in the middle and there's two pretty equal sides to the disagreement. Related to this, I realized through the years after leaving the Witnesses that an ex-member of any group, particularly of any church, is not an unbiased source of information. You have to take what they say with a healthy degree of skepticism.
I don't mean that they're just going to be telling you a pack of lies if they leave, whether it's the Witnesses, the Baptists, the Mennonites, the Church of Christ, whatever it is. Don't just take what they say as if it's gospel truth. Not that they're lying to you. That is not that they're deliberately lying to you. Now, some people do that, but that's not usually the situation.
It's that they've experienced something very negative that has hurt them deeply, and because of that hurt, all they're seeing are the bad sides of that particular group. I mean, we're all used to hearing those stories about groups like the Moonies or the Hare Krishnas and things like that, and you hear all sorts of horrible things, and I have no idea what the truth is. I'm not talking about the error in their beliefs. I'm just talking about the way people in the group are treated.
It might be quite horrible, and it might be quite wonderful. Who knows? I'd have to talk to a lot of people in the group, a lot of people who've left, spend a lot of time just making my own observation, and even then I might not necessarily know the whole truth. And for most groups like that, I don't have any involvement, never have with the Moonies or the Hare Krishnas. There's no point in my even spending time. I know from the Scriptures that what they're teaching isn't true.
Now, what life is like being a member of the group, I don't know. But these are the two things I saw as a result of leaving the Witnesses. Number one, as a Witness, my primary source of knowledge about members of other churches, other denominations or groups came from fellow Witnesses who used to belong to that group. You see, I thought I knew everything about Catholics because we had a lot of ex-Catholics in our congregation. I thought I knew everything about the Church of Christ.
Our pastor had formerly been a member of the Church of Christ. We had several former Baptists, former Lutherans, former Methodists. One of my close mentors as a teenage boy had formerly been Eastern Orthodox. So I thought I knew everything there was to be known about those groups because they would tell me what it was like, and they rarely had anything positive to say about them. I mean, maybe, "Oh yeah, they all had a nice time. It was a nice social club." That would be about the most positive you would find.
But after I left the Witnesses and got to know people in some of these churches that we had talked about, I realized that I hadn't been told the whole story at all. Maybe I'd been told that person's particular experience, but what they experienced or what they remember about what they experienced is very different from what somebody else in that same group is experiencing. I've met wonderful, very committed, loving Christians in a whole lot of different groups.
Groups that I was taught when I was a Jehovah's Witness were just in total spiritual darkness, that there was no love there and that they were primarily all hypocrites. So if what you know about a group is coming totally from ex-members of that group, you really don't know anything at all. I mean, you know one particular perspective, which may not be a particularly objective one even in itself, and at most it's only telling the experience of one person or at least only one side of that particular group.
And it works both ways. Since leaving the Witnesses, I've read lots of books written by former Jehovah's Witnesses, and I haven't read any that had absolute lies in them. But reading them, I realize they're not giving an honest, objective presentation of what life was really like as a Jehovah's Witness. I don't mean that none of them do. I've read some that I felt were very, very fair in what they said. But generally, what they're saying is what their readers want to hear.
And the people they're writing for are people who would view Jehovah's Witnesses as a totally heretical cult and want to hear all of the negative things they can hear about them. It reinforces their own view as it is. That will sell books. If someone writes an objective book showing not only the errors but also the strengths and why people join a group like that, no, there's not quite as much of an audience for that. It's a lot harder finding a publisher who would even publish a book like that.
Now, this important lesson that God has taught me hasn't come only from my experience as a former Jehovah's Witness. It comes also from my experience as an attorney. Now, I don't practice trial law anymore. In fact, I haven't practiced it for well over 20 years. But when I first opened my law office, I didn't have any convictions at that time about taking on lawsuits as long as I felt my client was in the right. Now, I did have enough convictions to refuse to take divorce cases and criminal cases.
But anyway, the first week my law office was open, a fellow came to me and wanted to sue his neighbor. And what he explained to me was there was a written agreement between the two of them when he bought his property that the pond that was located on his neighbor's land, that he would always have free access to it so that he could use the pond for fishing. But now his neighbor had gone and put a fence around the pond, and he couldn't fish in it anymore. Well, that seemed like an open and shut case, black and white.
He showed me the agreement. I think it was actually in a deed or something like that. And I thought, "Good. I not only have my first case, it's one I can easily win, and I'm definitely on the side of what is right. I'm upholding justice and fighting the bad guys." Well, usually the next step after you file a lawsuit and the other side answers is you take depositions. Now, a deposition is almost like trial. I say almost because you're not in the courtroom.
You're usually in an attorney's office, and you sit and ask questions to the other person. It might be a witness or it might be a party to the lawsuit, just like you would ask them in court. And they're either under oath or under affirmation. What they say is being taken down by a court reporter, and it can all be used in evidence.
So if they get in court and then change something they've said, well, you've got it right there in writing, and you can show that they've changed their story and are maybe even committing perjury. Now, the reason attorneys do that is that you don't want surprises when you get into the courtroom. If you happen to grow up with television and watched Perry Mason, I have to tell you that real law is nothing like that, particularly real trials.
There aren't all of these surprises that come out because you've already taken everybody's deposition, and you know what they're going to say before they get on the stand. It's a rare thing when there's suddenly some quite new piece of information, and the attorneys better have a good reason why it's just now coming out and why it wasn't shared when they were taking depositions. Well, anyway, when I deposed the guy we were suing, well, I heard a totally opposite side of this dispute.
Yes, he had fenced off the pond because my client was totally abusing his rights, driving four-wheelers across his property and doing all kinds of things that were never envisioned in the original agreement. And so to protect his land, he had erected this fence that kept his neighbor off of his land and also, unfortunately, had the effect of keeping him off the pond. But his story was it was the only way he could protect his own property. Well, the thing got settled out of court the way most lawsuits do.
And the reason why most lawsuits, in fact, it's usually around 90% are settled before going to trial, is because usually there is truth on both sides that each one finds their client hasn't told them their whole story, that both sides have committed wrong, and so they should work out some sort of agreement to make things right on both sides. And I saw that not only from my first legal case, but almost every legal dispute I got involved with during my first few years of law practice.
I mean, invariably, there would be a totally different picture painted by the other side. I don't mean that it was almost the same, but just a little different shade of color. I mean, often it was so different I'd sit there wondering, "Are we even talking about the same situation?" It's amazing how one-sided people can be, how blind they can be, seeing only their particular perspective and can paint things in such a way that makes them totally innocent and the other side totally guilty.
And I'm not talking about people who are intentionally lying. I'm talking about people who think they're telling the truth. They just don't know how to look at things from an objective viewpoint. And I think there's enough dishonesty in nearly all fallen human beings that we tend to shade things to fit our side. We tend to leave out details that would show the reason why the other side has acted the way they do. And then there's people who just totally lie.
I remember during the time I was going through college and law school, I owned a newspaper delivery service for different out-of-town newspapers in the small town I lived in, and I hired various people to deliver the papers. I didn't actually deliver them, at least not at that point in time. Other people did, and I kind of managed the whole thing. Anyway, one of the persons we hired was a young lady, a single mother, and as far as I remember, she did a pretty good job of delivering the papers.
I don't remember too many problems. But I remember one day seeing her, and all of her front teeth were missing. I mean, tops and bottoms. And it's like, "What happened to you?" "Oh, well, I was taking a little boy to visit his dad, who has visitation rights, who was her ex-husband, and my ex-husband punched me in the mouth, knocked out my teeth." I thought, "That is terrible. Wouldn't surprise me if he ends up in prison or something. That's just awful.
I'm sure he'll lose his visitation rights over that." Well, I accepted that and never questioned it. But sometime later, it was maybe a year later or something, I was at my dentist getting my teeth cleaned and just chatting to him. He said, "Oh, one of your newspaper carriers is one of my clients." I said, "Who's that?" And he gave the person's name. I said, "Yeah, isn't that horrible how her husband knocked her teeth out?" He paused for a minute, and then he just started laughing.
And I said, "Well, what's the matter?" He said, "Is that what she's telling people?" I said, "Yes." He said, "No one knocked her teeth out. I pulled them out. They were all rotten. I'm the one who took her teeth out." I thought, "Oh, I don't know what to believe anymore on anybody." Well, I thought to myself, "Boy, what a horrible liar and what she's done to her ex-husband's reputation." It also cautioned me to be very careful about believing any story or accepting it on face value until I've heard the other side.
And that would solve so many issues and problems we often have in church because we hear gossip from one person about what somebody else has done, and rather than going to the other side, we just take this as gospel truth, and then we form a negative image of our brother and sister, and that maybe even stays with us most of the rest of our life because we never bother to ask them their side of things.
And so now I would say most people would find me not a very sympathetic hearer when they're telling me the story about their ex-spouse or about a neighbor or something in a former church situation or something like that. Now, the problem isn't that I don't have a sympathetic heart. I certainly do. It's just that I'm going to always reserve judgment until I've heard the other side. Or if it's not something I even need to be involved with, I'm just going to basically have no judgment in my mind.
All I know is that this person has said such and such. But if there's ever a reason I need to be involved or have to form an opinion about a church, a person, or something like that, I'm going to talk to the other side so that I know I've heard everything before forming an opinion. And I strongly, strongly encourage you to do the same. You'll find that most situations in life are not as black and white as they're described to us by our friends and church members. That is, most disputes and things like that.
And that a lot of bitter situations can be worked out because the other party isn't nearly as unreasonable or horrible as what they've been painted to us by our friend or fellow church member. The second lesson that God has taught me is don't stereotype people, particularly people outside of your own group, your own church, your own denomination, whatever it is. Now, the word stereotype is a word that came from the printing industry.
Originally, after the invention of the printing press, printing was done with movable type. If you printed up one page and you caught an error, you could actually go in there and move a letter around, replace a letter with the correct one, and print more copies after that. Around the early 1800s, somebody invented the idea of printing with a metal plate. Instead of having movable type, an entire page would be set and then impressed onto a metal plate, and then you would print from that plate.
And once the plate was made, no changes could be made. And the stereotype was one of the very early forms of printing from a metal plate. And so every copy was pretty well guaranteed to look exactly the same. Although it was originally a printing term, today the word stereotype generally has the definition of forming an oversimplified, standardized image of a person or a group.
My dictionary goes on to explain stereotypes are typically generalizations based on minimal or limited knowledge about a group to which the person doing the stereotyping does not belong. In other words, you're forming an image of a different group, say Muslims or something like that, that you don't know very much about. You just have a few general characteristics, and you attribute them to the entire group of people.
Now, in our society today, our Western society, it's considered very politically incorrect to stereotype women or to stereotype racial minorities. But there's quite a double standard here because it's perfectly all right to stereotype men. All men are a certain way, usually a negative image. Or to stereotype all whites or all conservatives. And it's certainly all right to stereotype all Bible-believing Christians like we're all just out of the same mold.
One of the early examples of a group of people stereotyping others was the Pharisees. They stereotyped their uneducated Jewish brothers. For example, at John 7:46-49, we read a conversation between the Pharisees and the soldiers who were sent out to arrest him. They asked the officer, "How come you didn't bring this man back?" And this is what we read. The officers answered, "No man has ever spoken like this man." It says, "Then the Pharisees answered them, 'Are you also deceived?
Have any of the rulers or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed.'" In other words, only ignoramuses believe in Jesus Christ. The Pharisees, the wise people, are any of them following him? But it wasn't just the Pharisees who stereotyped people. All of the Jews did. They had their stereotype view of the Samaritans as basically just worthless people, people they refused even to talk to.
The Samaritan woman was surprised that Jesus talked to her because she said Jews don't have dealings with Samaritans. It's the very reason why Jesus went against that stereotype in his parable of what's known now as the Good Samaritan. He was saying, "Don't assume that Samaritans are worthless people. Perhaps they're closer to God than most of you Jews." And in the same way, the Jews stereotyped the Gentiles as being utterly outside of God's plan, having no value at all unless they could be converted to Judaism.
Most Jews would never go inside a Gentile house. And yet what they were so blind to was that God was about to abandon the nation of Israel, that they were rejecting their very own Messiah. They were rejecting the invitation to the wedding feast. And as Jesus had foretold, the invitation would now go out to others, the ones that the Jews viewed as the blind, the crippled, the worthless, the Gentiles, that is. Well, that's very similar to how Jehovah's Witnesses looked at other people.
Everyone who was not a witness was basically lumped together and constituted, quote, "the world." If they were professing Christians, they were all lumped together as Christendom. So you may be a very committed Christian who has surrendered your life to Christ. You may live far closer to Jesus' commandments than the Witnesses do.
And yet in the Witnesses' eyes, they would lump all of us together with nominal Catholic or Orthodox, with self-righteous hypocrites, with every group, Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, Baptist, Pentecostal, Unitarian, Ultraliberal. We're all in one pile together in their mind, and then they stereotype us all as being in spiritual darkness, as being hypocrites, and as people who are totally ignorant of Scripture and of Christ's commandments.
I remember once sharing with a fellow Jehovah's Witness elder, a very good friend of mine, and I was talking about my father, who was considered an unbeliever because he was not a Jehovah's Witness. And I'd mentioned that even though he wasn't a witness, he doesn't smoke, gamble, never committed adultery. I've never seen him drunk, and he's extremely honest.
And I remember my friend's reaction was, "That is really unusual." In other words, if you weren't a Jehovah's Witness, they just assume you must be immoral or a drunkard. Certainly, you smoke or gamble or things like that. And likewise, we stereotype clergy as being the very worst of the worse. Witnesses stereotype them as being money lovers, preaching things they know aren't true just in order to tickle the ears of their congregations, that they're hypocrites, etc., etc.
And certainly, there's a number of them who are, but this is how we viewed all of them. I remember at one of our conventions, they were having a little skit about a family who was studying with Jehovah's Witnesses, and the family's pastor finds out about it, so he comes to call on them. And of course, he's overbearing and rude and things like that. But I remember he walks in their living room, and this family happened to have a cigar box there.
Now, Jehovah's Witnesses don't smoke, but they assume everyone who's not a witness does. Anyway, the preacher looks at the cigar box and opens it up.
Supposedly, it's got these fine, expensive cigars, and he just grabs two or three and sticks them in his pocket as the husband of the family looks a little bit surprised, and then the minister looks at him and says, "You don't mind, do you?" And the man shook his head and said, "Oh, no, no, that's fine." Well, of course, we're all laughing, and you know that's how we viewed the clergy. We stereotype churches outside of Jehovah's Witnesses about how they were money grabbers.
I hear tales about churches that would post a list of the donors and how much they gave that year to the church. I don't doubt that that probably happened somewhere at some time, but as all of us would know, that would be extremely unusual. And likewise, they stereotype those of us who've left the Witnesses. We're apostates. We're dirty, evil, scheming. Our whole desire is to bring down Jehovah's Witnesses. That's all that we live for. We've lost our love of Christ. We love the world. We love power.
It was too hard to serve Christ, and so we've decided to serve Satan instead. Now, at the same time, Jehovah's Witnesses stereotype themselves. They have these perfect families. They're the only ones on earth in their minds who have true agape love. No one else even understands what that is. They're the only ones who have true joy. Other people might seem happy, but as far as lasting real joy from the inside, well, only Jehovah's Witnesses have that.
And in their minds, few people outside of Jehovah's Witnesses have stable, happy marriages. Now, the point of all this is that after I left the Witnesses, I found out how terribly untrue these stereotypes were and how terribly unfair it was to lump everyone together in one big pile. A regular committed Baptist is enormously different than, say, a nominal Roman Catholic or a Unitarian or a liberal Presbyterian, something like that.
And contrary to the picture they painted, I found that churches don't tend to be primarily after people's money. I do think many of them are too money-oriented, but that certainly hasn't been true of the places that I've fellowshipped during the last 30 years. And contrary to being these totally wicked hypocrites, I found over the last 30 years that many of my closest friends have been pastors, have been people in the ministry. Again, hypocrites are out there. Nominal Christians are out there.
Nominal Christians might make up the majority of people who use the name Christian. But it's so unfair when we stereotype people, put everybody in the same box, like there's no individuality, that everybody is just alike. And I've found so many examples of genuine Christian love outside the Witnesses. In fact, I've seen far more than I saw inside the Witnesses. I've seen lots of joyful people and lots of happy, stable marriages.
But I've often thought, you know, if I hadn't left the Witnesses, I would have never known those things. I would have gone through my life with blinders on, never really getting to know people other than as objects of somebody to convert or as people who would be destroyed when Christ returned. I'm so glad that God gave me the opportunity to open my eyes and to find out how many genuine brothers and sisters I have around the world.
Now, there would be little point to this lesson if Jehovah's Witnesses are the only ones with that problem. The reason I'm sharing it is that many, many other groups are guilty of the same thing. Perhaps not to the same degree as the Witnesses. The symptoms may not be as severe, but the illness is the very same one. For example, evangelicals. I remember the first week that I attended an evangelical church. It turns out that that night at their Sunday service, they were showing a Christian movie, a drama.
I don't mean for entertainment. It was something designed to evangelize, to make people want to surrender their lives to Christ. Anyway, in the movie, there are two families, two couples. One couple, they're unbelievers. The other couple are evangelical Christians. And the way they're portrayed, the evangelical Christians have this wonderful, close, happy marriage. The other couple, their marriage is falling apart. Their lives are falling apart. Everything's going wrong.
One day, finally, in the throes of crisis, they ask their neighbors, "What's different about you? Why is your marriage the way it is?" So the neighbors share Christ, and this couple with all the problems eventually invite Jesus in their heart, and their whole lives change. Now, the movie wasn't totally fanciful. I'm sure there are many, many situations where that very type of thing happens. But you know, the truth of the matter is that evangelicals have the same proportion of divorces as does the world.
There is no statistical difference between the two. And being in and around evangelical circles now for over 30 years, I've seen plenty of stormy marriages, plenty of divorces, plenty of marriages on the rocks. There are indeed evangelical couples that I could point to as people who have a solid marriage that I could use as an example, but I couldn't just pick any evangelical family at random and assume that would be the case. I'd have to assume that's probably not the case.
I also saw how evangelicals stereotyped everybody outside of evangelical circles. Nobody else who doesn't subscribe to their particular formula has any real relationship with Christ, doesn't know how to pray, doesn't have real victory in their life, has no evidence of the Holy Spirit in their life. And that's just simply not true. They've formed a stereotype of people that isn't true to life. It's not nearly as bad as the Witness one, that's for certain, but it is the same disease.
The Church of Christ likewise forms stereotypes of other professing Christians that they call, quote, "being in the denominations." And the picture that they portray so often of denominational Christians is very far from the reality that's there. I attended Anabaptist Church, and I think as Anabaptists, we could stereotype ourselves in many good ways, and it would be true. For example, very stable, godly marriages would be the norm, not the exception. Divorce is almost unheard of in conservative Anabaptist circles.
On the other hand, we do some unfair stereotyping of other people. We often think we can assess the spiritual condition of someone else just by looking at the way they're dressed. Someone comes up to them, a man dressed, say, in a bright orange T-shirt. The T-shirt might be a little bit baggy. It's not immodest. It doesn't reveal too much of his body or anything like that. Maybe even has a Christian slogan on it or something. Maybe he's wearing flip-flops, something like that.
Well, the average Mennonite will just immediately stereotype that person as being worldly. If he professes to be a Christian, it's taken somewhat with a strong dose of skepticism, and they would typically feel far superior spiritually just simply based on that person's dress without knowing anything else about that person. I've witnessed that many times, and it's very wrong when we do that.
The Bible does tell us to dress modestly, but we have to be very careful when we think we know everything about someone else just by the way they dress, particularly if the way they dress isn't inherently immodest. It's just different from the way Anabaptists, who are often called the plain people, the way they dress.
Also, conservative Mennonites and Amish groups like the Beachy Amish, in contrast with the old order Mennonites and Amish who use horses and buggies and that sort of thing, I noticed that the conservative Anabaptists often will stereotype the old orders as though none of them are saved. None of them know Christ. They just live in superstition. They're ungodly, selfish people. And I'm sure you could find many old order Amish and Mennonites who are just that very way.
But to just paint them all with the same brush, this is so very wrong. Jesus told us not to judge. That doesn't mean we can't exercise discernment as to what's good and bad, what's scriptural and unscriptural. But when we stereotype people, what it means is that we're taking a whole group of people, lumping them together, and then judging all of them by the same negative standard. Well, Jesus said he's going to judge us the same way. This isn't some little lesson in life.
This could mean your eternal destiny, your eternal salvation. If you're used to just judging people with such little criteria, except for the fact that they belong to some certain group that's different from yours, you may find that it's you who's being rejected by Christ in the very end. Now I want to move on to the third lesson that God has taught me in life.
And that lesson is appreciating the precious gift that we have of being able to read the Bible for ourselves and being able to let it speak to us directly without any human mediators. And like the other two, this is one that I especially learned because of my upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness. You see, as a Jehovah's Witness, I never felt confident just picking up the Bible and reading it alone and trusting my own senses to understand what it was saying. Now, don't misunderstand me.
Jehovah's Witnesses read the Bible a lot, probably more than just about any other group that's out there. And as a Jehovah's Witness, I often tell people, "We don't go by anything except the Bible." And in fact, I actually believe that. The problem is none of us dared to interpret the Bible ourselves.
If you wondered what the Bible taught on a subject, well, you would go to the index of Watchtower Publications, and you could do either a subject study or look up a particular verse and find where that was discussed in some issue of the Watchtower or perhaps in one of the books published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
And you'd look up what was said in one of those publications, and you would say, "Yeah, right, that's what that verse means." Not that what the Watchtower said was usually something unreasonable. It usually wasn't. But quite often, it's not the conclusion you would have come to just reading the Bible itself without any other input. Well, the straw that finally broke the camel's back was the night that we were having one of our Bible studies at the Kingdom Hall, and I was the one conducting it.
And this was the very last time I set foot in the Kingdom Hall. We were going through the parables of Jesus about the kingdom from Matthew 13, and one of them was the parable of the dragnet. I'm sure you're familiar with it, but let me read that to you. It's in Matthew 13, verses 47 through 50.
He said, "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet that was cast into the sea and gathered some of every kind, which when it was full, they drew to shore, and they sat down and gathered the good into vessels, but threw the bad away. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come forth, separate the wicked from among the just, and cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth." Well, that seems straightforward enough.
I mean, if I just read that as an ordinary person without any preconceptions, what does Jesus say? He says, "The kingdom dragnet." He's not going to bring in a perfect church. It's going to bring in good and bad people alike. And at the end, the angels are going to separate out the wicked from among the righteous. Now, that parable is not an excuse to have a church that doesn't practice church discipline, as also set forth in Jesus's teaching.
But it does show that his church would not be this perfect paradise not until he returns. That fit and unfit would find their way into the kingdom of God here on the earth. But the book that we were using to study this, the Watchtower Publication, said, "Well, from here, Jesus makes it clear that there are two dragnets. There's the genuine kingdom dragnet of Jehovah's Witnesses that brings in the true fish, the good fish.
On the other hand, the dragnet of the counterfeit kingdom, that's Christendom, that's all of the other churches that profess to be Christian, is bringing in the wicked fish. So you have two dragnets working here." Now, I remember thinking to myself, "Nobody, absolutely nobody reading that passage would come to that conclusion.
I mean, it's the exact opposite of what the passage says." And I realized further, if the Bible can mean something totally opposite of what it's plainly saying, what's the point of having the Bible? What we need is not the Bible, but more publications like those that the Watchtower puts out so we know the real truth of what Christ wants us to know. But no, Christ didn't give us a publishing house. He gave us the Bible, he and his apostles.
And like I said, that was my last night at the Kingdom Hall, and I left Jehovah's Witnesses a few days after that. And after leaving them, I came to realize what a precious gift we have today of being able, each of us, to have our own personal copy of the Bible in a language that we can read and understand. That is such a wonderful thing. The New Testament Christians didn't have that. The New Testament was just being written. No one would have had a complete New Testament at that time.
And throughout most of Christian history, the average Christian did not have a Bible of his own. Before the invention of the printing press, it was very expensive to have a hand-copied edition of the Bible. It was considered good if every church had at least one copy so that could be read to the congregation on Sunday mornings. But for so long, if you interpreted it different than the official institutional church, well, you were in danger of being tortured, of being burned alive, of all sorts of horrible things.
But think how wonderful it is today. We each have our own Bible. It's in a language that we can understand. It typically gives us cross-references so we can quickly find passages in the Old Testament that have been quoted in the New and other things like that. What a wonderful blessing. So what has utterly shocked me is to find that most Christians do the very same thing that Jehovah's Witnesses do, even though no one makes them do so.
That is, they don't trust themselves to just be able to read God's word and then use plain common sense, ordinary reason, and the illumination of the Holy Spirit that we all have as born-again Christians. No, it seems like everybody thinks that they have to have a commentary or some other book or a study Bible that tells them what the passage actually means, as though it doesn't mean what it plainly says.
And what I've seen is that commentaries, whether they are 400 years old or just came out last year, and study Bibles do the very same thing that the Watchtower Publications sometimes did, and that is they directly contradict what the scriptures say. In fact, they're every bit as guilty of that as anything that the Witnesses have put out.
For example, when I was attending an evangelical church, the church taught that the Sermon on the Mount that the early Christians viewed as the central teaching of Christianity, that it doesn't apply to us at all as Christians. It was written for the kingdom age. It's not for now. In other words, all of these commandments that Jesus gave in there, all of these instructions to us, and then even at the end when he says that to build on the rock, we must hear what he said and do it, that none of that applies.
Because of what Scofield and others came up with in their man-made design of dispensationalism that sticks a central Christian teaching into another age. I mean, if someone said that in the year 150, they would be put out of the church as a horrible heretic. I'll give you another example. 1 Timothy 2:9.
It says, "In like manner also, I want that the women adorn themselves in modest apparel with propriety and moderation, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly clothing, but which is proper for women professing godliness with good works." Well, I mean, that's plain enough. Christian women are to adorn themselves in modest apparel. They're not to have braided hair or gold or pearls or costly clothing. That's what it says. That's exactly how the early Christians interpreted it.
Well, one commentary says this about that verse. There is no prohibition of women wearing jewels and headdresses and handsome gowns here, but they are not to regard them as their real ornaments in comparison with a good life. Huh? That's what that means? Don't adorn yourselves with gold or pearls or costly clothing means, "Oh, it's okay to do it. Just view your good life as being a better ornamentation than that." Again, it's like what I experienced as a Jehovah's Witness.
If that's what 1 Timothy 2:9 and 10 means, well, why even have a Bible? We don't need the Bible. We need just commentaries to tell us what Christ really wants us to know because what the Bible says isn't what it really means. I mean, this is horrible. As a Witness, we had no choice. You had to accept what the Watchtower said or leave. That's why I chose to leave. But we do have a choice as Christians. You have a choice as Jehovah's Witness too because Christ is always our King.
Anytime we let anybody, whether a pastor, a book publisher, a commentator, a guru, whoever, become our teacher rather than Jesus Christ and the apostles that he sent the Spirit upon, well, then we've made Christ no longer our head. And we have no one else to complain about except ourselves because we have voluntarily let that happen. Now, in a different age or time, a person could say, "I didn't do it voluntarily. They forced me or were going to torture me." You can't say that today. I'll give you another example.
Hebrews 10:26-31. I don't think anybody could read the book of Hebrews who hadn't already been prejudiced and taught other things, but just picked it up and read it and not come to the obvious conclusion that even though we have entered the kingdom, even though we're on the vine that Jesus talks about in John 15, we can lose that. That even though we have been saved from the world, our ultimate salvation doesn't come until the end, that we can still be cut off of the vine. It's there in quite a few of the passages.
I'll read just this one from Hebrews 10:26-31. It says, "For if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment and fiery indignation which will devour the adversaries. Anyone who has rejected Moses' law dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
Of how much worse punishment do you suppose will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, 'Vengeance is mine. I will repay,' says the Lord. And again, the Lord will judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." Now, what could be more clear? It's not hard to understand.
Anybody with a high school reading level can read that and see what it says, that if the Jews were rejected, if they broke Moses' law, how much more will that happen when we reject Jesus Christ, even though it says we have been sanctified by the blood of the covenant? He's not talking about unbelievers, but someone who counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, a common thing.
We do this not through some theological error, but if we sin willfully after we have once been saved and cleansed from the world. However, this is what one commentary says about that passage. He first explains that this is not contradicting unconditional eternal security. He says, "His readers already accepted the doctrine of eternal security." So the writer of Hebrews isn't saying that a person can lose their salvation.
He was merely exhorting them to live in a manner that showed appreciation for Christ's sacrifice. Huh? That's not losing your salvation, what he describes there? A certain fearful expectation of judgment, fiery indignation, a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, that there no longer remains a sacrifice for our sins? And where does someone get the gall to just absolutely contradict the inspired word of God?
And with such audacity to say something like, "His readers already accepted the doctrine of eternal security." Well, for one thing, we don't even know who the writer of Hebrews is, and we don't know who the readers were. We don't know where this first circulated. How can you make a statement that the readers of this book already believed in unconditional eternal security when you don't even know who they are? So why do ordinary Christians put up with this? Why do they read commentaries?
Why do they read study Bibles? Do you think God gave us a book that was unintelligible, that we needed someone else to tell us what it really means? I mean, we're going back to the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church didn't want people to have the Bible in their own language because they were apt to misinterpret it, that they needed the church to tell them what the Bible really meant.
Well, we're free from that burden, but we impose it on ourselves that we need some learned intellectual, someone who's a graduate of theology school to tell us what this book really means. The truth of the matter is that God inspired the scriptures to be written for ordinary, non-intellectual people. Jesus specifically said that God has hidden the understanding of his ways from the wise and intellectual and revealed it to babes.
If his word needed a commentary by learned theologians to make it understandable, he would have given us one, or he would have started a divinity school to train such theologians. I know as an author myself how I would feel if someone wrote a commentary on one of my books, pretending they knew what David Bercot really meant, and then went off on all sorts of tangents and directly contradicted what I said, and yet presented it as being David Bercot's real thoughts.
Well, it's no different with a commentary on the Bible. Now, I'm not advocating going off on individual eccentric interpretations. God didn't just give us the Bible alone. He also gave us the church. And that's why I've spent the last 20 years of my life trying to educate Christians on the historic faith of the first two centuries after the apostles. What did Christ's body believe in the century or two after the apostles died? What really was the historic faith passed on by the apostles to their disciples?
You know, if Charles Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, had done that, he wouldn't have come up with so many theological aberrations. But the exciting thing is that what you'll find from reading the writings of the early Christians is that if you would just simply collect together everything that the New Testament says on any given subject, take those verses literally and very seriously, and you'll invariably end up with exactly what the early Christians believed.
So the beauty about the historic faith that is represented in the early Christian writings is that in the end, we don't really need their writings other than to open our eyes to the blinders that our church may have put on us because in the end, we find the historic faith is the literal faith taught in the New Testament. So in conclusion, let me review these three lessons again.
The first one was always make certain you hear both sides of a story before you form an opinion, particularly in an unfavorable opinion of another person or another group of people. Number two, don't stereotype people as though all people of a certain race or in a certain church are exactly alike. Allow for the fact that God's grace can reach in many places, and you may well find wonderful Christian brothers and sisters in groups that you and I would both feel are off the mark.
And yet God loves the people in those churches, and if they're responsive to him and his Holy Spirit, he will make disciples there. And finally, appreciate the gift, the right that you have to read the Bible for yourself and let it speak to you literally. You don't need a human commentary to tell you what God's inspired word means. Now, these are only three of the lessons that God has taught me in life. He's taught me many more things through the school of experience over the years.
And you know, I'm actually looking forward to what he will be teaching me in the years ahead. But what about you? Are you learning from the school of life, or are you letting God's lessons to you be wasted because they don't fit whatever preconceptions you were raised with, or they don't fit the preconceptions of the church that you now attend? God wants to teach you, but you have to be a willing pupil. No, no,.